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Thursday, February 20, 2014

Some of my design solutions for this theme were to think outside of the box and not do the standard lab coat and other objects that a lot of people think of when they hear the word scientific, i wanted the theme to influence my piece, but not be a direct link that is easily pointed out, so after lots of brainstorming and thinking i came up with the idea of drawing the x-ray of a birds wing, which after more consideration and looking at the other option for my project i decided to go with this one because it appealed to me the most and was out of the box for me to accomplish.

The mini lessons we had during class were helpful in learning how to use the different mediums available to us for the project it was helpful to learn what mediums did what, how they worked, and how to overall use them for the future. Learning how to use pen and ink was interesting as a different medium to use for the future. Pencil is the basis of drawing so being reminded how to use pencil again was very helpful. The charcoal was interesting as it's not a medium I've used before and it would have been nice to work a little more with it, overall it was good to be able to test out these different mediums for both this project and future projects.

To try and show contrast in my work with the white charcoal and white pencil I put to use the lessons we learned about both pencil and charcoal, being careful where i applied pressure, being conscious of where i wanted the lights and the darks to be overall. It was a little difficult for me as the pencil i was using didn't blend well with the charcoal so that was a bit of a struggle to get the full range of values i wanted, but overall leaving key spots black or white i think i achieved some good contrast with this piece.

Moving on the charcoal and pencil i used. I chose this medium because it provided the best visualization for what i was trying to achieve that would have been extremely difficult and tedious had i used pen and ink. I wanted to work with the charcoal a lot because I've never really used it before and wanted to try something new. Overall i like the way that the charcoal and pencil helped bring what i had imagined onto the paper in the way it does.

Overall the techniques i used during this piece were line work, as seen in the feather bones, there were a lot of lines to do, and they had to b noticeable and clearly distinct which was somewhat difficult to create as i was working with the charcoal because of its tendency to smear while i was working on other parts of the drawing. Most of what i used was shading and value range to create the look of a bird's x-ray'd wing which involved very dramatic changes in values.

The risks that i took in this project were working with a new medium, which I've had next to no experience with and doing something that's very outside of the box from the drawings i normally do. For me doing anatomy of any animal is very difficult because often times the look expected from a relatively analytic drawing and my style of art clash in very weird ways that don't tend to work out well so this was a big step for me. The anatomy was the hardest part, finding the bones and the joints and the different parts of the bird that i needed to display, first starting the sketch i had planned an entirely different drawing, but what i had envisioned i wouldn't have been able to draw due to spacial issues and finding how to place what and where it would all go. So this was definitely a big risk for me to take, but it came together wonderfully in the end.

So my overall experience with this project was positive as i took that big risk and it turned out extremely well, working with a new medium was fun and informative, it was also interesting working with black paper which i haven't done before, but hopefully i can do more works like this in the future. Overall this project bettered me as an artist and exposed me to things that are relatively out there for me.